During this course I worked with a group of other teachers to create a lesson utilizing universal design. One of the tools we used was the CAST Lesson Building site to help us understand universal design and layout a good lesson plan. This was probably the first class in which we were involved in a group project over the whole 5 weeks. At first I was not sure how it would work out, but we used a number of tools such as Google Sites and Google Docs for managing our group information to develop and share ideas. One of our first assignments had us using Book Builder to create an online book that allows students to see pictures hear or read text and have fun little animated characters tell little facts regarding the story being told. I can see how this can be highly motivated for little kids, but I think that secondary level students would be easily bored with what they were watching. As a technologist I would encourage the use of this tool by the elementary teachers and the middle school teachers. I would see how it would work in high school as well, but would not expect the same interest that younger grades will have.

For the remaining 4 weeks our group work to develop a classroom project that offers universal learning concepts to help students of all backgrounds learn the content. We made a history lesson about World War II that would cover geography as well as technology concepts as web development or desktop publishing for students to utilize multiple aspects to learn about the historic event. I was group leader I think because I was already doing this project in my classroom. We created sample works for student to have an idea of what we would be doing prior to starting the project. Working together in this manner worked out quite well. Since we all worked full time it seemed that the days we actually produced work was on Saturday or Sundays often working up until the last few hours before an assignment was due.

Overall I thought this was a very good project and many of us worked together or later projects. I want to try and encourage the use of google docs or an online wiki for students to share documents and even help teachers develop high quality cross curricular lessons that can be done in multiple classes or outside of school at any time of day or night. I could see how elective and science courses could work together, or even core courses could work together to develop projects where students would work independently as a group.